Tobias
Kraudzun

Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Colorado

Abstract

This paper examines depictions of women’s bodies
in Kirino Natsuo’s 1997 psychological crime thrillerAuto(Out), focusing
on the novel’s engagement with the ways in which Japan’s persisting domestic
logic has informed contemporary economic structures and, by extension,
complicated the question of Japanese female subjectivity. Ultimately, this
reading aims to illustrate that the popularity of Japanese crime fiction is
embedded not in the genre’s reproduction of literary conventions, but rather in
its capacity to politicise the act of reading by offering audiences a critical
lens through which to examine reality. Kirino Natsuo’s crime fiction paints a
complex picture of contemporary Japanese urbanity. Her portraits of the modern
Japanese city are gritty, her explorations of the criminal mind compelling, and
her depictions of contemporary Japanese social relations unnerving, and often
unequivocally bleak. Yet Kirino’s fiction does not merely present a pessimistic
vision of humanity—rather, it calls attention to a number of largely invisible
cultural conditions, frequently via the voices of characters representing
social groups who have been historically relegated to the margins of public
discourse. Kirino’s 1997 novelAuto(Out), which earned the writer
France’s prestigious Grand Prix for Crime Fiction, is perhaps the most
representative example of this quality of Kirino’s work. Via its intimate exploration
of the lives of four women who are housewives by day
andbentōfactory workers by night—and who are propelled by
desperation into the criminal underbelly of modern-day Tokyo—the novel
illuminates some of the particular ways in which women’s bodies have been positioned
as instruments of late Japanese capitalism, and in doing so underscores the
gendered logic according to which not only private relations but also grander
socio-economic institutions in modern Japan operate.

Keywords: gender in Japan,
feminism, Japanese genre fiction, women in the workforce.

References

Heidegger,
M., 1962.Being and
Time. Translated from German by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. San
Francisco: Harper.

Notes

Concerning
domesticity in Japan, it is important to understand the role of theshufu, or housewife,
within the context of the nation’s discourse on labour. As Mariko Asano Tamanoi
(1990, pp. 19-20) notes, from a sociological perspective the urban middle-class
housewife has, since the number of urban wage earners and their families began
to grow in the late nineteenth century, come to be considered representative of
the Japanese woman. Japan’s sexual division of labour, she explains, gives
women almost total autonomy within the family domain, and marriage in Japan,
whether or not it is a romantic union, in many respects continues to be
perceived as a "socially valued female career in which a woman finds
self-fulfillment (ikigai).”

About the
Author

The
authoris a doctoral student in
Japanese in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilisations at the
University of Colorado at Boulder. She holds MA degrees in Japanese and
Interdisciplinary Humanities, and a BA in English Literature. Her research
interests include gender and sexuality in Japanese genre fiction, gender
performance and poetics in medieval and early modern Japanese theatre, and
critical theory. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines
corporeality in contemporary Japanese crime, horror, and sci-fi. She is also an
instructor at the University of Colorado, where she teaches courses on Japanese
literature, cinema, and pop culture.